Two Ways Of Looking At 'Tiny Furniture'

“Who among us is noble enough not
to envy Lena Dunham?” Elizabeth Gumport begins her analysis of Tiny
Furniture in the n+1 film review supplement. (Disclosure:
I’m a contributor.) Dunham’s born-on-third-baseness, and the
fact that her autobiographical film addressed it directly, was one
of the factors that made it nearly impossible for a lot of critics
to treat TF fairly when it was first released. In
retrospect, this seems like an embarrassing mistake on their part.
Worse, they also screwed up, per Gumport, by assuming that by
turning the camera on herself, Dunham was making a movie about her
appearance: “if a young woman wants to talk about her life, she
better be talking about her looks. Having a body is the only
experience she is allowed to take seriously.” These are
points I’d been waiting for someone to make, and I’m grateful
Gumport made them. But then she describes her reading of the
movie’s plot, and while I think her perspective is valid, it
couldn’t be more different from mine.

Gumport describes the moment when Aura (Dunham) decides against
moving in with her Oberlin friend Frankie in Brooklyn, electing
instead to continue living rent-free in her mom’s Tribeca loft:

To cover rent in Brooklyn, Aura would—one imagines—have to spend
her days answering phones in an office or hustling for freelance
assignments. Making videos would be like baking, something she did
on the weekend. Who, in Aura’s position, would choose this life?
Only a child (who can’t imagine death) or a coward (who won’t).
Moving out of her mother’s apartment would be an ignorant and
extravagant waste of Aura’s time, which is finite and
irrecoverable, just like everybody else’s. The movie ends with Aura
and Siri talking about a ticking alarm clock.

Wait, let me get this straight. If the choices are a) shucking
the privilege you were born to, at least superficially, and
spending your early twenties working at the kind of degrading,
formative office jobs that force people to confront their worst
tendencies and those of others on a daily basis and b) living with
your parents and using your luxurious access to time and money to
make art from your cushioned experience, in Gumport’s opinion, b)
is the BRAVE choice?

I guess it’s hard for me not to take this personally and get
upset; like most people, I didn’t have the luxury of deciding
whether to try to make art or to try to make a living. (See:
Gumport’s expert analysis of why people envy Dunham so much they’re
blinded to her work’s great qualities). So let me calm down
and read Gumport’s final paragraph:

Aura chooses Manhattan over Brooklyn, art over hobbies. And why
shouldn’t she? Just because some people overcome obstacles in order
to succeed doesn’t mean obstacles are necessary to success. Who
knows what they might have achieved without them? Maybe their
movies would be better. If they aren’t, it’s not Lena Dunham’s
fault, and there’s no reason she should be made to pay for the fact
that some people live in Park Slope.

AUUUGHHHHHHH!
(deep breathing)

Sorry, I just … wow. I guess the only way to answer that
question — “Who knows what [people] would have achieved without
[obstacles]?” is to reverse it and and ask: Who knows what Lena
Dunham might have achieved with them? It’s an
interesting thought experiment, actually: the experience of
Dunham’s early 20s, filtered through the lens of a particular kind
of crappy experience that she will never have. It would have been a
different movie: maybe a worse one, sure. Or maybe … an even
better one.

The luxury of being allowed to speak before you know how badly
the world wants you to shut up is not just a luxury granted to the
rich, it’s a luxury granted to the very young. Obstacles of any
nature would have given us a movie with more perspective, and its
tightly-focused immediacy is one of TF‘s charms.
But I, for one, think obstacles — and the skills we gain from
learning to get around them — make people and their work more
interesting. If her next projects
are going to be something other than TF retreads, it’ll be
because Dunham has, in spite of everything,managed to stumble
across some.